This last week in Manhattan Beach, the school districts had DARE, which is drug awareness week. This is specifically put on the by the school district, where the police get involved and bring in a lot of information for the children about street drugs and the illegal drug cartels. If you saw kids running around with little red bands around their wrists, that is all because of drug awareness week. They did a great job talking about the illegal drug cartels, now I want to talk about the legal drug cartels. Why? Because, legal drug cartels kill more people by far than the illegal drug cartels. In fact, one of the studies in The Journal of American Medical Association states that illegal drugs kill 10 to 20,000 people per year whereas the legal, properly prescribed drugs’ side effects kill an average of 196,000 people per year. It’s a much bigger problem by far, and really not dealt with as much as the illegal drug cartels.
A lot of people don’t realize how much the legal drugs affect people. They put 8.8 million people in the hospital. According to The Journal of American Medical Association, approximately 28% of all hospital emissions are due to the side effects legally prescribed drugs.
This stems from the fact that we are a drug culture; we have loads of drug commercials that teach our kids and even us that the best way to deal with our problems: our aches and pains and discomforts, is to take a pill.
We want to be aware that there is a drug problem and it’s huge and right within our own home, because the legal drug cartels are hitting us at home. In 1992, they passed a bill to allow the pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to us.
Think about it for a moment: Why would the pharmaceutical companies want to advertise prescription drugs to the general public?
Because, they want us to be more comfortable in asking our medical doctors for certain drugs for certain medical conditions, thinking we have to have a drug to get better.
The bill they passed was really a great marketing tool! They got the bill passed by using all their drug cartel lobbyists to bribe the politicians. The end result was that the pharmaceutical companies’ profits went through the roof, and are now the most profitable companies in the world.
We have to start at home when educating about drug awareness by getting back to the basics on what’s adding health as well as understanding that not only are illegal drug cartels bad, but so are the legal drug cartels. Both set of drugs are bad for your body. If we look at things from this stand point, it would be less likely that we breed a future drug culture. And look for healthy ways to promote health from the inside out.